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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4674295" data-attributes="member: 77019">And yet look at the reality of the Albigensian crusade, a good proportion of the population of Southern France was depopulated on behalf of the Church in order to repress an intellectually thriving culture they didn't have control of, you had the rise of the Dominican order and their doctrine of Torture, which became a rule in all Inquisitions, wheras Torture had been previously forbidden in most legal codes throughout Europe  (one of the reasons the Templars escaped punishment was that Edward II didn't have any Torturers and therefore under Church law couldn't conduct interrogations, he had to wait until professional Torturers were sent from Italy, and by the time they arrived all the Templars in England had mysteriously dissapeared).   A cultural revolution had started in Southern France already, this was where the whole troubadour tradition got started, all the concepts of Courtly Love and Chivalry etc.  But it was stopped cold in this area, precisely because it was deemed to be infected by the Gnostic heresy of placing value on intellectual progress for it's own sake.  One of the main reasons you didn't have the kind of intellectual and cultural Renaissance in France that you did in the northern Italian cities (and in many of the German and Dutch Hanse cities further north) is that the equivalent prosperous, thriving towns in Langedoc were essentially depopulated in huge massacres during the Albigensian Crusade and were culturally broken by the Crusade and the the Church, who remained active there for centuries seeking to root out the persistant Cathar heresy. In Spain where it was strongest the Inquisition was mostly a massive pogrom against Jews and in the rest of Europe, primarily against Heretics within the church.  Those acting outside of the church were not as frequently targeted.  People get confused between the Catholic Inquisitions and the Witch trials, the latter were mostly a protestant phenomenon and didn't really get going until the 17th Century.   The truth is there were multiple different factions in the church throughout the middle ages, each of the religious orders had their own personalities, alliancs with different secular powers (including both Princes and city states).  The Dominicans did their torture, the Cistercians were proselytising the value of Windmills and the new overwash water-wheels spreading an industrial revolution in Europe as early as the 11th Century, which was the major reason for the increased ubiquity of high quality homogeneous iron all over Europe starting in this period, which had a huge impact on Europe militarily and socially. But pretty much all of them railed against the public role of women in Medieval society and things like bathing, and had a general horror of technology or information in general outside of Church control.  It can be a bit of a cliche to portray the Church into the universal enemy of Science in medieval times but it's not really unfounded. G.</blockquote>

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